The urge to immediately react to news with a tweet is a phenomenon that can be dangerous. If one were to collect one paisa for every tweet that was sent out without a thought and then regretted only when trouble was stirred, it would end up in quite a sizeable fortune. But then there are the hackers as well. Those pesky IT geniuses who love creating trouble by trespassing on to accounts and making controversial statements.

Such unfortunate incidents happen quite a lot with public figures and organisations, and the latest victim of such cyber crime – or so it has been claimed – is the Twitter account of India Post. For a moment, when a tweet was posted by the organisation’s official handle, it seemed someone out there really had a bone to pick with Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal (not that the latter is having a particularly nice week any way, what with ink being thrown at him yet again).

At 12.10pm, the India Post Office handle tweeted out: “@ArvindKejriwal you have failed us big time Mr. Kejriwal, for you petty political gains you can become headlines for Pakistani press”. A strange tweet coming from the official handle of a central body, even if the rather strained relationship between the Centre and Delhi governments isn’t much of a secret.

Someone at India Post had obviously realised the error and the tweet was deleted. The postal network also tweeted an apology to those concerned, saying: “Account hacked & some negative message @ArvindKejriwal has been posted. We sincerely apologies for inconvenience @manojsinhabjp @rsprasad”. (We will forgive the grammatical error since there may have been some haste involved while posting.)

This is not the first time that such messages have been tweeted out from official government handles. Twitter user Kapil has obviously been keeping tabs, since he tweeted out a series of screenshots of various government bodies – such as Delhi Police, Indian Railways and All India Radio – having posted messages with a political comment. He posted four screenshots along with the message: “Army shd not be politicized but its ok to politicize Indian Post, Del Police, Indian Railway, All India Radio & other govt departments”.